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Paper short abstract:

This paper brings insights from teaching anthropology in a New York prison together with new ethnographic research in a colonial-era leprosy containment village in Tanzania. I consider possibilities for assembling pedagogical, ethnographic, and abolitionist work toward undoing carceral violence.

Paper long abstract:

In her 2022 piece, “Abolition in the Clutch,” Savanna Shange challenges us to think about the incommensurabilities between abolitionist praxis and the disciplinary work of anthropology. How can we reconcile our identities as theorists and ethnographers with our commitments to literally end the violence of a carceral state—all while refusing to water down abolition into a theoretical metaphor? In 2021-2023, I was an instructor in a prison education program, teaching anthropology to incarcerated students in upstate New York. This paper reflects on my attempts to think with those students’ insights as I developed a new ethnographic project. My new research is sited within an old leprosy isolation village created under British colonialism in Tanzania in the 1950s. This place typifies colonial tactics of spatial and bodily enclosure that Bernault (2003) historicized as central to the making of prisons in colonial Africa. Today, leprosy is treatable, and the spatial strategy of disease containment has been long disbanded. Remaining residents—people cured of leprosy and three generations of their descendants—live at this place in the remains of a carceral past. The ethnography asks: what forms of material traces remain after the infrastructures of containment are unmade? In this paper, I question how ethnographic insights into afterlives of containment could come to actually matter in that New York prison and elsewhere. By highlighting how this research emerged from and influences my abolitionist commitments, I consider how anthropological teaching, research, and active abolitionist work might come together as mutually supportive practices.

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Paper short abstract:

This contribution explores the quotidian lives of Honduran migrant women working as “inmates” in Spain as elderly caregivers. It discusses how, due the irregular migratory status of the caregivers, elderly’s homes can be analyzed as a prison (real and imagined) that reproduces daily violence.

Paper long abstract:

During the last ten years, (irregularized) migration of Honduran women has increased dramatically, as has U.S. Border Externalization toward Mexico and Central America. The increase of interdiction in Mexican territory and militarization at the Mexican-Guatemalan Border has turned Mexico into a country of waiting and entrapment. Waiting is a necropolitical mechanism of disenchantment and dehumanization, causing migrants to abandon their goals. Still, waiting is also a platform for creating resilience strategies to face migration management.

After multiple attempts to reach the United States, many women are forced to return to Honduras. After several months or years, they manage to embark on the migration experience again, but this time to Spain. Hondurans are allowed to stay 90 days in the Schengen area, after this period they become “irregular” migrants. Honduran women find jobs as elderly caregivers working 24/7 from Monday to Saturday as “inmates.”

This contribution firstly explores the quotidian lives of Honduran migrant women working as “inmates,” as well as the strategies of resilience they create to cope their feelings of being “incarcerated.” Secondly, it discusses how their workplace, can be analyzed as a sort of prison (real and imagined). Finally, although elderly’s homes do not seem to be a given space for carceral practices, the "irregularized” migratory status of the caregivers echoes a place where invisibility, oppression, exploitation, and abuse are reproduced. For this research, narrative interviews with Honduran migrant women working as “inmates” elderly caregivers were conducted in the community of Valencia during 2023 and 2024.

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This paper describes the experiences of older Japanese adults managing life within carceral circuits of the prison-welfare nexus through rhythms of reoffending and release. It argues that decarceral anthropology means addressing ageism/ableism and supporting the imagination of inclusive alternatives

Paper long abstract:

Prison populations around the world have been aging rapidly since the turn of the 21st century. This has been a relatively under-researched area in studies of mass incarceration, but has become increasingly urgent as the cost and human rights problems of keeping frail and disabled older people in detention have come under scrutiny. The aging trend has been attributed to the punitive turn in criminal justice systems and the failures of welfare systems to address widening socioeconomic inequalities affecting older people. However, this paper argues that the more fundamental problem lies in the ageism and ableism that reproduces careceral logics across welfare schemes directed at isolated and impoverished older people. Undoing this problem requires a more radical change. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with formerly incarcerated older people and resettlement NGOs in the Tokyo Metropolitain Area, this paper describes the ways welfare systems based on anti-ageing logics contribute to the criminalization of old age. I argue that the common pattern of reoffending among many individuals reflects both the blurring of lines between prison and society (shaba) for formerly incarcerated older people, and an attempt to exercise moral agency within the narrow limits of precarious conditions of welfare dependency. I also describe attempts to provide anti-ageist and anti-ableist alternatives to carceral systems led by third-sector organizations, arguing that these values should be central to abolitionist praxis and decarceral anthropology.

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Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic fieldwork investigating the impacts of community supervision in the United States demonstrates how carceral control over employment dictates the terms for one of the key avenues offered as rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

Paper long abstract:

Community supervision (probation, parole) is a system of uncertainty diffuses the work of dehumanization done within jails and prisons beyond institutional walls. In the United States, this alternative to incarceration is often seen as a rehabilitative, more humane alternative to incarceration. My paper will focus on two responses to the disruptions, pressures, and restrictions experienced by my interlocutors along their arduous journeys to remain ‘free.’ Many struggled to meet basic needs, as their overlapping criminalized and racialized identities compound the obstacles to accessing steady housing, employment, and healthcare.

Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I demonstrate how some of my interlocutors, predominantly Black men formerly or currently under community supervision, came to embody what I refer to as toxic productivity to hold onto their precarious position in the community. These individuals sought to remain compliant, with particular care placed toward mandates restricting their employment options. Their desire to reintegrate into society becomes infused with the need to accumulate capitalist value as a ‘productive’ man/citizen. This (re)making of an acceptable identity, rooted in tropes of work and manhood within a racial capitalist framework, often came at the expense of their physical and mental wellbeing. Conversely, others chose to deploy their personal experience with the justice system to become political organizers and justice reform advocates. This choice also came with risks.

My work offers an analysis of the role that contemporary carceral processes have in mediating identity and social network formation beyond jails and prisons.

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This paper explores histories of resistance in and against the European detention regime as moments and practices of 'undoing' bordering, carcerality, and coloniality. In doing so, this multi-sited study unfolds a variety of imaginaries and relationalities resisting the border-carceral continuum.

Paper long abstract:

The proliferation of immigration detention centres across the European territory evinces a crucial connection between borders, carcerality, and the continuation of the colonial project. Decades of critical research by scholars, activists, journalists, and former detainees has attempted to bring this to the light. In this context, my work explores contemporary histories of resistance in and against the European detention regime. These compose fragmented, cross-border, and decentralised ‘counter-archives’ anchored to grassroots circuits of knowledge production. My project engages with counter-archives of resistance by dwelling on a variety of sites across the UK and Spain where bordering, carcerality, and coloniality are simultaneously ‘done’ and ‘undone’.

In the framework of my PhD project, this paper examines moments of ‘undoing’ the detention regime by thinking through visuality and spatiality. To foreground this I outline my archival and ethnographic methodology deeply inspired from militant research and decolonial scholarship. Following this, I unfold a multiplicity of histories of resistance which takes me from grassroots documentaries across the Spanish state to radical social centres in South London, stopping by public squares in Barcelona’s old city centre and anti-raids meetings in the UK. Through these I analyse attempts to ‘undo’ bordering politically as well as epistemologically, paying attention to the tensions and contradictions present in multiple sites while teasing out processes of meaning-making referring to the visual and the spatial. Via a decolonial and abolitionist lens, this opens up possibilities for engaging with relationalities and imaginaries which push beyond the coloniality of borders and the carceral continuum.

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My work centers on the possibilities of life within Lebanon’s convoluted carceral network. Specifically, I explore how prisoners conjure alternative solidarities that undo and resist the prison's suppression of care. To conduct this study, I draw on the memories of one former prisoner named Sana.

Paper long abstract:

Lebanon’s “prisons” powerfully attest to the ways in which carceral logics are embedded and reproduced across a nexus of varying sites and spaces. In Lebanon, carceral and confinement spaces are located in abandoned buildings, underground parking lots, police barracks, and other such structures. These spaces are marked by brutality and neglect: mattresses are exposed to mold and bugs, diseases and infections spread rampantly, and food and water are scarce commodities. How do people survive and live in such precarious places? My work centers on the possibilities and impossibilities of life within Lebanon’s twisted carceral network by drawing on the memories of one former prisoner named Sana.

By listening to Sana's stories, I learned about the bonds and solidarities that prisoners forged with one another. In my paper, I accordingly show how prisoners mobilized these bonds to subvert and undo the suppression of intimacy and care that is endemic to carceral spaces. I conceptualize prisoners’ relationships as forms of collaborative survival in a context that is becoming exceedingly unlivable amidst Lebanon’s ongoing socio-economic collapse. I argue that these relationships point to cracks in the workings of carceral power. By "crack," I mean gaps and openings within seemingly all-consuming carceral systems. These cracks are small spaces of alterity where prisoners care for and collaborate with one another to transform everyday life inside the prison.

In the end, my paper suggests that Sana’s memories resist and undo the specter of carceral power in Lebanon – never seen, largely forgotten, but always present.

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Paper short abstract:

In Kanaky/New Caledonia, the penal population's own bodily practices spread outside the prison, becoming generational badges and configuring a specific aesthetic spectrum, showing the articulation between person, class, gender, ethnicity in a colonial space of settlement.

Paper long abstract:

In Kanaky/ New Caledonia, a French overseas territory in the south Pacific, the prison's experience was no longer then just a 'passage' but a real forge of symbolic, identity and aesthetic references "at home". This process made use of the logic of physically inscribing by tatooing and circumcision one's difference and thus the reaffirmation of one's specificity as men culturally defined as Kanak (the indigenous people of the country). Individual and collective identities are restructured in the porous passage between domesticity and the prison walls, determining new ethnic and class's visibilities in a contended space in which the Kanaks have historically constituted the head of the anti-colonial emancipation movement. "Making" men inside and outside the penitentiary then becomes as much the consequence of a dynamic of criminalization of global Kanak society as it is the expression of individual and generational forms of resistance to the stigma.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the contrasting experience of the carceral for two prisoners’ families in rural Nepal, exploring how they navigate different social and physical spaces. ‘Carcerality’ emerges as subjective and contingent on social markers of difference, in a dialogic relationship with state law.

Paper long abstract:

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around a district prison in western Nepal, this paper will focus on the contrasting experience of ‘the carceral’ for two prisoners’ families from the same community, by exploring how they navigate different social and physical spaces. They continually wrestle with the tensions of the different expectations placed on them: on the one hand, being a ‘good parent’ requires an involvement with the carceral world in order to care for an imprisoned son; on the other, a respectable member of the community is expected to keep their distance from that very world. I will detail how they move in and out of different social spaces, and how their status also shifts across the physical boundaries of the prison, to conclude that ‘the carceral’ they experience is subjective, and contingent on their social identities of caste, class, and gender, in a normative societal order that in itself can be punishing. A focus on relatives here also brings out the dialogic relationship between the prison and the world outside, as ‘free’ people’s experiences of carcerality inevitably impact upon the daily lives of their relatives behind bars.

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Based on ethnography in English prisons, this paper shows how prisoners’ traumatic life histories & social locations have become subsumed into accounts of their criminal risk. It invites scholars to consider how critique is repurposed to make and remake carceral subjects and institutions.

Paper long abstract:

Psychiatric practice in prison has often been read deterministically: one is trapped in carceral logic, read pathologically, and undone as an individual. For some years, attention to prisoners’ life histories and social location has been presented as a way out of this trap: an emphasis on social deprivation, traumatic experience, and individual acts of subversion have been put forward as a way to humanise, fuel resistance, and ameliorate the situation of those categorised criminally sick.

This paper problematises this strategy. It does so by considering the recent integration of trauma-talk in the vast mental health infrastructure of the British prison estate. Grounded in ethnographic research with former prisoners, prison staff, and Parole Board documents, the paper traces how discussions of trauma, social deprivation, and oppression have been subsumed into classificatory practices that assess prisoners’ risk, categorise them as pathological, and assess their prospects for release.

Focusing on prisoners’ tactical navigation of such practices, the paper demonstrates how clinical life histories which emphasise trauma and oppression have actually come to constitute an extension of confinement - intensifying surveillance and shaping medico-penal practice. To make sense of this, I utilise theory on ideology and the legal form to understand how clinical personhood and carceral categorisation work together. Ultimately, the paper asks what anthropologists might find when we think about how carceral institutions constitute personhood, institution, and ideology together - especially when they do so with tools appropriated from radical critique.